Chapter Four
The Story Arc
Case Studies: John McPhee • Ariadne and Theseus • Harold Scheub • Kurt Vonnegut • Syd Field • Bruce Schuman, Intel
We could write anything we wanted to, but each composition had to be accompanied by a structural outline…. The idea was to build some form of blueprint before working it out in sentences and paragraphs.1
Draft No. 4
John McPhee
▪ A Legacy of Sequence ▪
The esteemed professor of journalism and Pulitzer Prize–winning author John McPhee, whom you met in the previous chapter, still credits Olive McKee, his Princeton High School English teacher for her rule about structure.2 Mrs. McKee’s teachings about compositional logic have deep roots that reach back in time to primitive societies and even further back, ...
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